The Mind's Eye:

"Sylvia Frumkin," highly intelligent young girl, became a schizophrenic in her late teens and spent most of the next seventeen years in anti out of mental institutions. Susan Sheehan, a talented reporter followed "Sylvia" for almost a year talking with and observing her listening to her monologues, sitting in on consultations with doctors, even for a period sleeping in the bed next to her in a mental hospital. (Publisher's Discription- Amazon.com)

Sheehan's depiction of schizophrenia is both accurate and empathetic. She humanizes the diagnosis and makes the real struggles present in the mental health system come alive. Because she followed Sylvia for so long and remained by her side even to the point of sharing her room, Sheehan is able to shed light on the difficulties and political struggles that are part of running facilities as well as highlighting the effects of staff interactions with clients. She does a good job of balancing a view of politics and fund seeking with clinical staff doing the best they can with limited funding. Though institutions as Sylvia knew them are becoming a thing of the past, it is likely that many clients that we see with chronic problems will have experienced a hospitalization of this type somewhere in their history. This book allowed me to get a sense of the inside of these institutions in a way that statistics could not. Because these experiences can be both traumatizing and life saving, it is important to gain some frame of reference for these experiences. I believe that reading this sort of book is one way of broadening my core knowledge and becoming a more well rounded clinician.

As a student I had no idea what the world of long term chronic mental illness was like; diagnostics were largely words on a page and did not have real people with real problems behind them. This book shows delusions as part of a way of thinking for Sylvia. She speaks for herself and shares her world view in detail, sometimes with humor and sometimes with pain. I highly encourage any future practitioners to read this book and books like it. Humanizing what we do while in training can not be over prioritized.

I encourage people to pick up this book and take a look at one person's journey through schizophrenia and through the system. The prose is easy to read and the story moves quickly, like a magazine article. I read it over a single weekend.